Ok, I think it's best to first go over what I'm trying to do and, perhaps, someone here will know of a better way to accomplish this.

We have a list of news articles in the root site. Each of those articles will be tagged with the department they're associated with. A department has a subsite with a layout that will automatically pull just the articles that have been tagged with their specific tags. It needs to be one layout for all instead of 60 different department-specific layouts.

Again, this is Sharepoint 2010 and the root site as well as all sub sites are publishing sites.

The problem is, I have no way to install custom web parts nor can I edit anything with Visual Studio. I am confined to working only in Sharepoint Designer.

My idea was to add a column into the news list that would contain the site names of all the subsites. I was hoping I could just use a lookup column so that, when we create a new subsite, it would be automatic. If I have to create a second list and just add "create a new record with the site name" as part of the subsite creation checklist document then so be it but I prefer to keep things as automatic as possible.

Thanks in advance!